Eve of the Assumption

I.

August has the augmenting of figs
and enriching of the spectrum
with the sun's lowered slant, a summer height
that softens, to bevel softer yet
with dewier mornings and dewier nights;
a wealth of glow and past the boughs yellow
on groves and swimming pools, on brassy cows
in their wading acres, mown or feral
with wind-mingled seed - and crink-necked lower
pregnant figs, by the same light that brings
the far-off cusp of the first unclasping
leaves: for here, in dumbfound August,
that distant undoing is also close,
yoked light, in presence of the ripening,
so hale in mercy, in seasonal ease.

II.

September waits behind a wilting door
wind turns aside like a dead oyster shell
radiating gofun: redolent sunflowers
pewed on the threshold, hold post-bloom
their planetoid stares, adorned with birds,
to face ground webs, over all the hollows.

Ajar is the door at the end of August,
giving to the lightest touch
objectless wonder over sight; fresh bed
reprieved at the breathing window tastes it,
beds paradisial old, broached with spiders
and seeds: undreamed, unlooked for, honed store.

Mercy's maturity. The summer grows
slack and broken, like sets of swings
near a disused tennis court - with memory, empty,
letting the wind through, whistled over
the railroad's skinned-shin metal, like birds
that tousle death-tops of the rail-side tansy.

Water voices rake the air,
better far than any fountain;
in wind the dilatory poplars
are gravid with youth and wisdom.
Sun sings on their leaves' pale undersides
its shorter, lower, shortening lease.

With lessening things, more embraces
a staying in the land that breaks it, as
the river's reduction holds the heron;
as bushels of wind past any recall,
are sweet with cut hay heat, the cattle's
russet broadsides and blunt-nosed lowing.

Mercy alike, grows not old,
but grows on the old like veining
huckleberry through the stump of sponge
that lets its flutings be bared, its barkless lungs
breathe hummus-faced and root-haired. Mercy is
newer than dew, across dead grass

father's heat-burnish in blinding range;
in cottonwoods that laugh in waves
though laden with dust. Mercy is
the mountain's quiet messages
sent along the asphalt like wind-sped detritus.

A world-bordering of pearl peak
luminescent in the pressing east;
an outpushing slant that runs the sward
to a snowy light in the impatient evening;
the house of land is like a bounding hare.

A foundation in the fully expended,
to every nowhere no way; mercy is rain and plough,
giant's hand on the raw shoulder,
on the bread of land a sleep-eyed kindle. Mercy is
close as the full apples on the head-knock bough.